Google Offering Circular Ads for Macy's, Best Buy

Google is working on so-called circular ads with Macy's and Best Buy, according to reports. The goal is to lure more Web searchers into brick-and-mortar retail stores.

Google
(NASDAQ:GOOG)-taking a popular, time-honored advertising medium to the Web-is offering
circular ads to lure consumers into retail stores this holiday season.
Bloomberg said the search-engine provider is working with
retailers such as Macy's and Best Buy to offer circular ads, which have become
staples as inserts in newspapers all over the country.

However,
instead of stuffing paper within more paper, Google is presenting eye-pleasing
(or so it hopes) ads when users click on search results.

Google
searchers will see promotions with several pictures and larger type when they
click on search ads and, eventually, banner display ads. Google's ad-serving
technology will actually build the promotions on the fly, based on query topics
users enter, as well as their locations.
For example, a
search for a Macy's in Manhattan will likely return ads more geared to that
retailer's locations in New York City than those in suburban Connecticut.
Nick Fox, vice
president of product management for Google, is expected to unveil the circulars
Oct. 3 at the Advertising Week show in New York City, where Madison Avenue's
top advertisers flock each year to rally around their businesses to discuss new
approaches. Fox said Google is rolling out both a print and Internet marketing
campaign to tout its new circulars.

Fox laid the
foundation for his announcement by touting Google's various ad formats in a corporate blog post Oct. 2. He pointed out that
retailer CafePress has enjoyed great success using Google Sitelinks, or navigational
links that take users into different sections of a Website, without making them
jump around within the Website.
Fox also noted
that users can watch movie trailers directly within ads, while product ads
display a product's image, price and seller brand.
"Because
this format is often so useful, people are twice as likely to click on a
Product Ad as they are to click on a standard text ad in the same location, and
today, hundreds of millions of products are available through Product
Ads," Fox noted.
Location-based
ads are big and getting bigger, particularly via mobile devices. Over 20
percent of Google desktop searches are location-based, but that figure jumps to
40 percent from mobile phones. More than 270,000 businesses that place ads via
Google use location extensions to attach their business address to their ad
campaigns.
Google, which
made most of its $29 billion last year from search and display ads, also offers
click-to-call ads that let consumers use their smartphones to click to call a
business they're interested in learning more about.
Circulars
might be one small aesthetic tweak to Google's ad-serving practices, but a
bigger one looms on the horizon regarding its social ads.
The company is
also hoping its +1 buttons help consumers share products or services they like
with fellow friends and shoppers. Since introducing the +1 button in March, Google
has racked up over 5 billion ad impressions per day on publishers' sites.
Facebook is
also betting big on social ads, though it likes to leverage them by boosting
the information-sharing policies for its users.
The Facebook Timeline, for example, helps encourages
users to share more legacy information of their lives. This includes social
applications that, once enabled, automatically publish info about how and when
those users are consuming applications such as Spotify or Hulu.